India’s Biggest Drugmaker Plans to Start Developing Its Own Medicines (Bloomberg Businessweek) -- You’d be hard-pressed to find someone who’s lost more during the recent upheaval in the generic drug business than Dilip Shanghvi: He forfeited $17 billion to be precise, plus the title of India’s richest man. After a four-year decline that erased 65% from the value of Sun Pharmaceutical Industries Ltd., the drugmaker he founded, Shanghvi is preparing to bounce back. He’s doing it by borrowing a page from Big Pharma’s playbook: investing in higher-margin patented medicines rather than relying solely on copying drugs. That won’t be easy, especially when the multinationals that dominate the pharmaceutical business have already seen the payoffs from their massive research and development spending become more uncertain. Those giants are increasingly turning to acquisitions to fill out their pipelines, and that’s where Shanghvi also sees an opening. Aided by an ability to move quickly because of Sun Pharma’s relatively small size—it had only about $4 billion in sales in 2018, compared with Pfizer Inc.’s $53.6 billion—and streamlined decision-making, Shanghvi thinks the company can eventually pick up enough early-stage innovations and key personnel to generate half its revenue from patented medicines. “It does require some additional skills beyond what a typical generic has,” Shanghvi says, but those skills aren’t impossible to acquire.